Research Finds Teachers More Conservative Than Other Americans Who Are Equally Well Educated
Teachers are fairly conservative on many public issues, including free speech, family values, religion, social justice, and other key American values, according to new research by education professor Robert O. Slater of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette published in the winter 2008 issue of Education Next. Although teachers’ attitudes tend to be more progressive than the average citizen’s, on many questions, they are surprisingly more conservative than Americans with similar levels of education.
Teachers tend to be more educated than other Americans, averaging more than 16 years of formal schooling compared to about 13 years, so Slater compared them to equally educated Americans as well as the public at large.
Analyzing data collected from elementary and secondary school teachers from 1972 to 2006 by the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, Slater found the following:
On free speech: As a group, American teachers tend to be more supportive of free speech rights than other Americans. But when compared to other Americans with 16 or more years of schooling, teachers are less supportive.
On family values and religion: Although more education has a liberalizing influence on Americans overall, its impact seems to be mitigated for teachers, according to Slater. On homosexuality and abortion, for example, teachers tend to be more liberal than less-educated Americans but more conservative than Americans with high levels of education. Teachers also attend church and pray more than average Americans.
On social justice and human nature: During the past four decades, support among teachers for the liberal view that the government should help the poor has declined more sharply than it has for other Americans. Slater notes, however, that teachers seem to be more likely to see the world as good and that they tend to be more trusting than average Americans.
Slater observes that it is important to note the values that teachers hold because they spend so much time with students. “Teaching is as much a moral effort as it is an intellectual enterprise,” Slater explains. “Teachers not only educate our children how to think and solve problems, they also inform children’s beliefs about what is right, good, and important in life, shaping their values in the process.”
There are nearly three and a half million public and private elementary and secondary teachers in the United States, more individuals by far than in any other occupation. During the 2005–6 school year, each teacher spent upward of 1,260 hours working with the nation’s 54 million elementary and secondary school students.
The teaching profession is surprisingly homogeneous, points out Slater. According to 2004 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, most elementary and secondary school teachers in this country are white; only about 9 percent are African American, compared to about 13 percent of the U.S. population as a whole and about 16 percent of their students. Most are in their 40s; about 75 percent are women. On average, American teachers have been in the classroom for about 14 years. They earn about $43,000 a year (close to the $43,954 median annual earnings of Americans with bachelors’ degrees).
Read “American Teachers: What Do They Believe?” now online at www.EducationNext.org.
Robert O. Slater is a professor of education at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.